T Bolt looking forward to seeing your Stirling finished, it is certainly coming on well.
Just about to convert an Airfix Stirling I made a few years ago into an D Day or Arnhem glider tug, I'm not happy with it in it's original state as a bomber. It is one of the first kits I built after a 25 year brake in the hobby and I was tricked by the kit a quite a few times. The plan is basically to remove all the rubbishy old turrets except the rear gunners position and try and hide the more than slightly dodgy spray job I originally gave it with invasion stripes. I then have another kit waiting to be built as a bomber and I intend to beat the bloody thing into submission by joining the top of the fuselage together as flush as possible at the expense of the lower fuselage joint. I lost most of the rivets on the upper fuselage with my original build after being forced to use a carpenters plane on the joint, it was the loss of the rivets and the poor joint that spoilt the look of the kit the most for me. My basic plan this time is to try and hide the nasty bits as best as possible, after all I am never going to pick the model up and look at its undersides.
I am sat here looking at my original build saying to myself what a head ache this is going to be. Even though it was a brand new kit the transfers (decals if your American) fell to 1000 pieces when I wetted them, airfix transfers are just rubbish and I think they are made from a mixture of plastic carrier bags and leafs.
As already said the turrets are appalling things, the sort where a badly moulded gunner sits with a giant ring of plastic between his hands sandwiched between two very bland looking guns. The undercarriage parts are as deformed and misshapen as the Elephant Man but with patience you can put them together and they look reasonable enough (by my standards, im not so fussy as some). The tiny windows along the fuselage all have huge dimples that make them look like those bulls eye Georgian window pains that tatty old pubs have.
Apart from that it is a really lovely old kit which I like lots and lots. Regardless of its many faults and obvious age there is something very reassuring about this kit still being in production, I think it is because it survived the dark years of Thatcher government and is a link to more honest times now forgotten.